Progressive-Democratic Party Newspeak Dictionary

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D) has a new entry. While using her authority to line-item veto $21 million she says was allocated for “anti-choice” programs.

Anti-choice: what she vetoed was this:

$10 million for marketing programs about adoption, $2 million in tax credits for adoptive parents, $3 million for a “maternal navigator pilot program,” $1.5 million for pregnancy resource centers and $700,000 for a nonprofit pregnancy center.

She claims her veto was based on the pregnancy crisis centers spread disinformation and withhold other information. These are plainly bogus beefs.

Instead, Whitmer is claiming that giving women options regarding their pregnancies is anti-choice.

Self-Awareness

This time, not of politicians, but of artificial intelligence software. In a Wall Street Journal article centered on Alphabet’s Google firing of the Google AI engineer Blake Lemoine, there was this cite of AI specialists:

AI specialists generally say that the technology still isn’t close to humanlike self-knowledge and awareness.

That seems a bit narrow and self-important to me. What’s the basis—factual/empirical, logical/philosophical, any other—for seriously claiming that self-knowledge and awareness have to be human-like in order to exist?